Why “softfail vs hardfail” still trips people up

The first time I flipped a production domain from an SPFsoftfail to an SPFhardfail, I did it on a Friday afternoon. Big mistake. A bulk email sender I’d forgotten about—an events platform I’d set up months earlier—vanished into the void. That sting taught me what the sender policy framework was really asking: do I understand every place my mail can originate